Stephen <mca### [at] aolcom> wrote:

> Actually, I feel quite upset after watching it.
> I can't say why.

Wow - Paul is highly educated, well-spoken, and is held in high regard as a very
serious and knowledgeable mycologist.

He entertains some very interesting ideas, which is why he's probably unpopular
with the driest of the soul-sucking bureaucratic administrative academics.

His interview evoked some of the more interesting science fiction novels
concerning vast, cluster-type lifeforms such as Stanislaw Lem's "Solaris", and
lifeforms that exist and function in a life-cycle and time scale vastly
different from our own, such as in Frederik Pohl's novels.

That fungi are ancient, exist in vaster colonies than we know, and have the
capacity to "intelligently"* influence and shape their environment to such a
degree that they may have directly and profoundly affected the course of human
evolution seemed quite a provocative hypothesis.

*He references some experiments on slime molds, and uses their observed
behaviour as evidence of "intelligence", whereas at the present time I only see
basic chemotaxis and the inevitable geometric and mathematic inevitabilities of
iterative selective cycles.

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